


Catch All the Stars

by Elliott_Fletcher



Series: The Forgotten Diary of Hinata Shouyou [1]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst and Feels, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-19
Updated: 2016-09-19
Packaged: 2018-08-16 03:07:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8084359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elliott_Fletcher/pseuds/Elliott_Fletcher
Summary: It is a thousand still moments before he speaks coherently again.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blackcricket](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackcricket/gifts).



> EDIT: I changed the description to a different excerpt and adjusted some words and phrasing.

 

 

> **"Catch all the stars,**  
>  in your bare hands or not;  
>  feel them burn your skin;  
>  feel your lined-palms rot.
> 
> Point all the fingers: now  
>  leave the blame on me,  
>  and free your mind of pain;  
>  cry a hopeless sea.
> 
> Protect all the lives;  
>  don't lose a waking hour:  
>  time's slick between your fingers;  
>  save them: hold the power
> 
> Cry all your writhing tears;  
>  let me loose in outer-space;  
>  I'll keep company with stars,  
>  and dream only of your face.
> 
> Hold all your wishes tight;  
>  warm, our hands intwined;  
>  I'll never let yours go,  
>  So never forget mine."
> 
>  

Kageyama closes the diary, sighs, and as the air leaves his lungs, tears escape his eyes. Hinata knew he would die; that's what the poem said. He swipes his tears away and carefully reopens the diary, flipping through the musky pages. His lungs fill with thick air, and he chokes on his regret ("Promise me, Tobio?" "Why should I?" — he's so full: full of the tired, melancholy feelings that accompany the loss of a person, a life.) 

He tears the page from its home, his heart pinching in its broken socket. He folds it, and it is soft like the caress of a cheek on his fingertips. (Hinata's cheeks were always soft — like billowy clouds.)

The note is ponderous in his back pocket, always present, sinking deeper with his stomach, deeper with the crumbling debris of his broken heart. (Except his heart is past broken; he is not recovering from a middle-school break-up, he's recovering from a train wreck and the millions it affected.)

 

 

When his Mother asks what it is, examining it, having plucked it from his bedside table, he turns away his eyes. She sits beside him on the bed, holding it as carefully as he, and he wonders how she knows. 

"Was it _his_ , Tobio?" She prompts.

It's been five months. The note has been through the wash thrice, and he's saved it each time. It has been muddied, muddled, and moddled. He still reads the words like they are clear in his eyes. He has memorized every line, knows them in his heart, and yet he is so paranoid that there will come a day he cannot recall them. This paranoia is what compels him to retrieve it. 

He nods, his eyes shivering, his skin shivering, his heart a cold, massive lump in his chest where it hiccups in the shadows, longing for the sun that was Hinata Shouyou. He presses the illegible note to his chest to quell the ache and is reduced to tears when he remembers how Hinata's hand felt there, warm, against his own, intertwined.

His mother lets him cry on her shoulder. Her comfort cannot be compared to any other, but her blanket of safety does not stretch to the depths beneath his specious shield. "Can you read it to me?"

He cannot deny her request — not after all she has done to raise him — so he speaks in mumbling words and drooping sentences. She always understands him without fail.

" _Catch all the stars, in your bare hands or not; feel them burn . . . your skin; feel your lined palms rot._ " Kageyama inhales disruptively. "He's predicting how I'll act . . . after I find him, Mom." 

She nods, and rubs his prickling hair into his scalp.

" _Point all the fingers: now leave the blame on me, and free your mind . . . of pain; cry a hopeless sea._ He knew I . . . I would blame him, knew I'd need to to live with myself.

" _Protect all the lives; don't lose a waking hour: time's slick between your fingers; save them: hold the power_. . . . He wanted me to protect the team, all who knew him, not to waste time, not to let them hurt like he did.

" _Cry all your writhing tears; let me loose in outer-space_ . . . Mom, he wants me to let him go, but I can't — can't just — just — "

Kageyama dissolves into heaving sobs; his mother hushes soothing sounds into his ear, rubbing his shoulder blade through his sweater. "You can do it, Tobio. Take your time — however long you need."

It is a thousand still moments before he speaks coherently again.

" _I'll keep company with stars, and dream only of your face._ He says he'll go to heaven, where everything is peace, and yet still he'll think of me — and we only ever fought!

" _Hold all your wishes tight; warm, our hands intwined; I'll never let yours go, so never forget mine._ "

His mother knows it's the end before he's finished speaking because she tightens her grip on his shoulders; he burrows into her embrace, and his breaths become desperate.

"He wants me to live on, mom, and he's going to be here with me, and he's such a dumbass! the idiot thinks I'll forget him and my ambitions, and I really, really want to. . . . Easier if I just forgot."

She purses her lips at his swear, and turns him in her arms so she can see his face clearly in the static night. "Never disrespect the dead, Tobio. Shouyou exceeds all my initial expectations: you know this, surely. He was no idiot; he was a wise child."

Kageyama's eyes water, and with his next exhale they spill over. "I know."

He tucks the note into his bedside drawer, lets his Mom kiss his forehead and draw the covers up, and releases all his tension when she shuts the door behind her. He whispers into the pillow all the words he wished he had whispered into Hinata's ear — but the pillow does not sigh into his chest, or radiate heat or sunshine like Hinata used to. Still now, Kageyama thinks he does. 

He lets his eyes fall shut, dried tears glueing them closed, and when he dreams, he dreams of Hinata, and when he falls, he catches all the stars.


End file.
